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Sunday, October 17, 2010

Have you ever seen the movie Groundhog Day? Our life seems just like that sometimes. We keep repeating the same problems over and over again, just a little different each time.

Sam has been inpatient since Wednesday at Children's in Neenah. He spiked a fever Wednesday which led us to assume that we were probably looking at another blood stream infection so we had cultures done and started our standard antibiotic treatment for the staph that he seems to be best friends with.

By Wednesday evening we were getting a little concerned as Sam was acting sick, which he never does. He was very sleepy and lethargic and he still had a fever. Normally when we start his antibiotic he perks back up after the first dose. Then we got the dreaded phone call from the pediatricians office. Sam was already growing out profuse numbers of Gram Negative Rods. Definitely not staph, we assumed we were dealing with E-Coli and we needed to switch antibiotics. We made the decision to take him onto the floor rather than dealing with an overnight stay at the ER while we arranged for our home health company to deliver new antibiotics.

Thursday morning Sam still had a fever. To add to that we began having difficulty drawing blood from Sam's central line. This was especially bad since we needed to be able to culture the blood off of his line to monitor the infection. Then we got back the strain identification results from his original blood culture and it wasn't what we expected. I heard the doctor say Klebsiella oxytoca and then my brain thought of a great number of really awful things. Klebsiella can be nasty. It is virulent and mutates easily to develop resistance to antibiotics.

To add to all of that the skin over the top of Sam's port looked terrible. Many calls were made to Madison and Boston. Between everyone we decided it was best to keep Sam in Neenah and keep treating to see if we could clear the infection and whatever was blocking his line from drawing.

Late Friday night, after the second round of TPA to help unblock his line, we were able to get blood from his central line for cultures and labs. His labs were still screwy, but I just learned that the culture from Friday night is still clear and Sam's line is working beautifully. We also just changed the dressing over Sam's port needle and his skin looks almost perfect, better than we have seen it in weeks.

We are just waiting on lab results from this morning. If labs are looking good (which should be the case because he is definitely acting like he feels better) then we just need to wait for arrangements to be made to get our home care company to deliver some antibiotics (on a Sunday) and then we might be able to get out of here. 5 days here is way too long. Sam is bored out of his mind and if I have to watch Lilo and Stitch one more time I am not sure what will happen, but it will not be good.

Of course we never believe the H word (home) until we are actually in the car driving away, but things are looking good.